"Happy stories are hard to tell, but Scott
succeeds in this engaging recreation of a child's Botswana, apolitical
and Eden-like. She has no sordid revelations, no shocking
surprises—just a raconteur's talent for making any story she tells
interesting." - Publishers Weekly
In
1987, Scott's parents ended “a peripatetic decade” through South
Africa, England, and New Zealand, and returned to Botswana with
seven-year-old Robyn and her younger siblings. Her mother is a
dedicated homeschooler (“Children learn best in unstructured
situations, when they don't know they're learning”); her father is a
doctor, who often serves “more than one hundred patients a day.”
Grandpa Ivor, a former ace bush pilot, whose later ventures include
coffin making, and Grandpa Terry, the personnel manager of a mine, are
both great storytellers. Taut and coherent vignettes breathe life into
the characters, and Scott's own storytelling skill renders childhood
ventures (breaking a horse, falling into a thornbush, distributing
Christmas bags) with remarkable immediacy and liveliness. There are
snakes, metaphorical and real, though the former rarely intrude upon
the child's idyllic world. The real snakes provide moments “where we
never knew what we'd learn, only that it would be interesting.” A
venomous puff adder serves as anatomy lesson, and her mother turns “the
death of a juvenile brown house snake into an exhilarating
philosophical lecture.” Happy stories are hard to tell, but Scott
succeeds in this engaging recreation of a child's Botswana, apolitical
and Eden-like. She has no sordid revelations, no shocking
surprises—just a raconteur's talent for making any story she tells
interesting. |
